pre-Code
Pre-Code Hollywood was the brief era in the American film industry between the widespread adoption of sound in film in 1929LaSalle (2002), p. 1. and the enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code censorship guidelines, popularly known ...
romantic comedy
Romantic comedy (also known as romcom or rom-com) is a subgenre of comedy and slice of life fiction, focusing on lighthearted, humorous plot lines centered on romantic ideas, such as how true love is able to surmount most obstacles. In a typica ...
Universal Pictures
Universal Pictures (legally Universal City Studios LLC, also known as Universal Studios, or simply Universal; common metonym: Uni, and formerly named Universal Film Manufacturing Company and Universal-International Pictures Inc.) is an Ameri ...
, from the play ''The Command To Love'' by Fritz Gottwald and Rudolph Lothar.
The film is preserved at the Library of Congress.
Madrid
Madrid ( , ) is the capital and most populous city of Spain. The city has almost 3.4 million inhabitants and a Madrid metropolitan area, metropolitan area population of approximately 6.7 million. It is the Largest cities of the Europ ...
who romantically pursues the wives of various government officials. Betty Compson and Mary Duncan play the objects of his attention.
Release
The film opened to much fan-fare on December 5, 1930. According to
Mordaunt Hall
Mordaunt Hall (1 November 1878 – 2 July 1973) was the first regularly assigned motion picture critic for ''The New York Times'', working from October 1924 to September 1934.
Alternate Version
The film was remade during production into three alternate-language versions. ''Boudoir diplomatique'' was the French-language version, starring
Iván Petrovich
Iván Petrovich ( sr, Иван Петровић, Ivan Petrović; 1 January 1894 – 18 October 1962) was a Serbian film actor and singer.
He was the first actor from Yugoslavia to have a successful international movie career. Petrovich mainly w ...
and Arlette Marchal. It was directed by Marcel De Sano and released in 1931, and is not likely to have been screened publicly in the United States. A Spanish-language version of ''Boudoir Diplomat'' was released on February 13, 1931 as ''Don Juan diplomático''. It was co-directed by
George Melford
George H. Melford (born George Henry Knauff, February 19, 1877 – April 25, 1961) was an American stage and film actor and director. Often taken for granted as a director today, the stalwart Melford's name by the 1920s was, like Cecil B. DeMil ...
(he would direct the 1931 Spanish-language version of '' Drácula'') with
Enrique Tovar Ávalos
Enrique Tovar Ávalos was a Mexican film director notable for remaking several Universal Horror films into Spanish language versions. These include ''La Voluntad del muerto'' ('' The Cat and the Canary'', 1927) and '' Drácula'' (''Dracula
...
, and starred Miguel Faust Rocha, Lia Torá and Celia Montalván. ''Liebe auf Befehl'', co-directed by
Johannes Riemann
Johannes Riemann (31 May 1888 – 30 September 1959) was a German actor and film director. Riemann was a member of the Nazi Party.Ernst Klee (2007) ''Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich: Wer war was vor und nach 1945''. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Ver ...
and Ernst L. Frank, was the German-language version, starring Riemann along with Tala Birell and
Olga Chekhova
Olga Konstantinovna Chekhova (; russian: Ольга Константиновна Чехова; 14 April 1897 – 9 March 1980), known in Germany as Olga Tschechowa, was a Russian-German actress. Her film roles include the female lead in Alfred ...